I was just reading a post about how the United Nations has become useless. I instantly dismissed it, and still am inclined to think it was missing something. Whatever, the details are not so important. What did give me pause though was that the author mention this was a position he had only recently come to, and "as recently as within the last decade," he believed something else. I too have often found my old positions antiquated. What if, it turned out, I eventually thought the same thing as this author? Would my current smug, dismissiveness be correct? Obviously not. So for thought: How can we communicate with persons holding a variety of ever shifting viewpoints? We need to be trying to learn (they may know something we do not, after all) and teach - which is also to convince, usually, I guess, but how do we do that? Perhaps some positions we need not fear are correct (I think the KKK has been permanently banished from the intellectual culture of our nation - and with good reason), but how do we teach them over to our side? Obviously, some will always be lost causes, but maybe many are not.
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